Month: July 2018

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]An everyday testimonial or review has to fulfill a solid of demands to keep me happy. It has to:

• Be loose with its keywords in all the right places (I’m looking at you first 150 characters), and tight in the rest (now you, 200 words).
• Be high-quality, without sacrificing some level personalization.
• Offer enough trust and authority to survive in the search engines (this one is most important).

This is already a big ask in a testimonial, let alone a product review.

There is an endless array of testimonial links out there for sites, but choosing them gets a little tricker when you go beyond the one-liners.

Luckily, the bandwagon effect is real and a universal favorite for link builders.

The Value of Testimonials & Reviews

It may not be the glamorous infographic you put on display in your blog content, but the trusty stagehand that gets the link building job done.

Reviews and testimonials provide fresh (and frequent) content.

They can signal to the search engines that a page has been updated giving you another opportunity for that page to get crawled and potentially rank higher depending on the quality of that review.

These reviews and testimonials also give you a chance to rank for long-tail keyword terms.

Beyond that, testimonials or review pages add credibility to a brand. You can influence potential customers, users, or clients still in the decision-making phase.

People who testify about your brand’s offerings will also get exposure for their company via linked or unlinked mention of their websites.

Win, win.

How to Gain More Testimonials & Reviews

To get started with this type of link building, find authoritative brands that feature reviews and testimonials on their website.

Also, you can reverse engineer any customers, users, or clients who are featured by your competitor. Put their websites into your favorite SEO tool to find out where they got links from. You now have a solid list of websites to consider pursuing.

Here are a few more ideas you can try out to get more testimonials and reviews:

• Implement a referral plan. For example, you could say we pay 10 percent for referrals.
• Create a release form for customers to digitally sign every time you receive a compliment.
• Send a discount code to your email subscribers and share it on social for every customer review.
• Automate a post-purchasing plan to consumers who have had a positive experience.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Journal by Anna Crowe on July 15, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What’s the difference between image alt text and title? Do you keep them the same?

This post will examine the differences between the image alt attribute, image title text, and image file name, and provide some basic recommendations on how to optimize them.

Alt Text vs. Alt Tag: Which Is Correct?

When you think of image alt text, the term that may immediately come to mind is “alt tag”.

Well, alt tag is really a misnomer and doesn’t exist at all. Because alt text, or alternative text, is the alternate text attribute of the image tag.

This is where communication in the SEO world can get dicey, because it may be known as one thing that just about everyone knows what an alt tag is, but in reality, it is entirely different.

Alternative text is used by screen readers for the blind to decipher what an image is about. It lets you specify an image description that is fed through an audio-based prompter that tells blind people what is currently on the page as they are scrolling through the page.

According to W3C Accessibility Guidelines, for code to be considered W3C-valid, it is important to include both image alt text and image title text in the image for important images on the page.

For design-based images that are unimportant, blank alt text attributes may be used. In this situation, screen readers will just skip over the image.

What Is Image Alt Text?

Alt text, or alternative text, is used to display text that describes an image to “alternative” sources.

Primarily, its goal is to make images more accessible to the blind who use screen readers, to make the web much more accessible per W3C accessibility guidelines.

Its secondary goal, as previously mentioned by Ann Smarty on SEJ, it is for people who have decided, for whatever reason, to turn off images in their web browser application. In addition, it satisfies those user agents who are also unable to “see” the images.

As a rule, alternative text should include targeted keyword optimization in a context that describes what the image is about. If no alternative text exists for the image, it will be displayed as an empty image.

Image alternative text is that text that pops up when you hover your cursor over an image. Because Google cannot exactly crawl images in-depth, and mostly text, Google uses alternative text as a focus when they are trying to understand what the image is about.

It is important to note the W3C’s Accessibility Guidelines for Alternative Text:

When using the img element, specify a short text alternative with the alt attribute. Note. The value of this attribute is referred to as “alt text”.

When an image contains words that are important to understanding the content, the alt text should include those words. This will allow the alt text to play the same function on the page as the image. Note that it does not necessarily describe the visual characteristics of the image itself but must convey the same meaning as the image.

What Is Image Title Text?

The image title text attribute is an attribute that is used to provide additional information about the image. That being said, the image title is not used for search ranking, so it is not quite as important to optimize for.

But, if you’re an obsessive SEO completionist and want to optimize everything for the best in W3C optimization, by all means, do include both the alt text and title text for your image.

You don’t have to do anything super insane for title text optimization, however. Just use a quick, short, catchy title that complements what you optimized for the alt text, and you will be good to go.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Journal by Brian Harnish on July 11, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]